A variety of applications such as music players, browsers, productivity applications, anti-virus, program extensions, add-ins may make attempts to access a network (e.g., the internet) from a computing device. Some of these applications may be unknown or may be applications for which a user may prefer not to allow access. Further, malicious or programs such as spyware, viruses and so forth may also attempt network access. Thus, allowing uncontrolled access to a network via a computing device may permit network access to unknown, undesirable, and/or malicious programs which may harm a computer and or information that is important to users of the computers. Thus, firewalls may be used on computing device to manage the network access permitted via the computing device.
One a traditional firewall approach involves prompting a user to indicate for each application whether to permit or deny network access attempts. However, users may not have the sophistication or knowledge to make an informed determination as to which particular applications should be permitted or denied access. Accordingly, user may inadvertently or unintentionally permit access to malicious applications and/or block useful or benign applications. Further, user may consider the prompts annoying or frustrating when they are not comfortable with making the requested determination. Thus, this traditional firewall approach to determining which application are permitted network access may be frustrating to the users as well as ineffective at preventing access to unknown, undesirable, and/or malicious programs.